The present invention relates to a tire marking system, and more specifically, to a tire marking system which facilitates management of tire identification information to be marked on manufactured tires.
In a tire manufacturing process, a bar code label which enables identification of each tire is adhered to a side portion of the tire. Inspection, consolidation and sorting work of the tires, and the like can be facilitated by use of tire information involved in the bar code labels. Moreover, based on the tire information in the bar code labels, it is possible to search for data stored in a database such as manufacture dates, manufacturing persons, forming conditions and inspection conditions.
In recent years, in order to facilitate tire management by customers who have purchased tires, it has been required to provide customer's own tire identification information on the tires. Such customer's own tire identification can not be provided on tires in the tire manufacturing process unlike the bar code labels, as tires that do not meet a quality standard are produced during tire manufacturing. Therefore, customer's own tire identification information needs to be provided on tires which have been manufactured.
A tire marking device is proposed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-84681 as an example of a technique to add tire information after tire manufacturing. This tire marking device forms recessed markings which provide tire information by removing part of a tire surface using a laser beam or the like. Information to be added is retrieved from a database based on information in a bar code label adhered to a tire, and the retrieved information is marked on a side portion of the tire.
However, when the markings of customer's own tire identification information are provided onto tires using a plurality of the above-mentioned tire marking devices, it becomes extremely troublesome and complicated work to accurately form the markings on the respective tires while managing the tire identification information for each customer and each tire size.